Thursday, October 28, 2010

The Shooting Gallery

1973

Shooting yearly self-portraits is nothing new to photography, but a rather extraordinary series has just been discovered and published in The Netherlands in a book titled "Almost Every Picture #7". Starting in 1936, the then 16-year-old Ria van Dijk went into a shooting gallery - one of those fair booths where every time you hit the target it triggers a camera shutter and you win a portrait of yourself in firing pose.

This series documents almost every year of Van Dijk's life (there is a conspicuous pause from 1939 to 1945) up until present times. But at the age of 88, Ria van Dijk is still shooting!

Call me crazy but I think one day a grad student will write a thesis on guns, violence and Western colonialism and use these pics as illustrations. I know it is suppose to be all fun and games but I just get an creepy undercurrent looking at these shots (pun intended.)

"If only all blogs were as life-affirming and tender-hearted as that of gallerist James Danziger. Whether his focus falls on the work of an individual artist or a particular theme, The Year in Pictures is compulsive reading."